rightfulness

Updated: June 2, 2025

Let it be admitted that there are difficulties connected with the institution; that John Brown raids, and incendiary emissaries, are wicked; that unlicensed denunciations of all implicated in the system, are grossly wrong. Still, can there be no calm and considerate discussion of the rightfulness or sinfulness of the laws which define and regulate slavery?

William G. Stevenson - Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army : Being a Narrative of Personal Adventures in the Infantry, Ordnance, Cavalry, Courier, and Hospital Services; With an Exhibition of the Power, Purposes, Earnestness, Military Despotism, and Demoralization of the South

The child is not to be made to comply with the requirements of his parents by being artfully inveigled into compliance, nor is his obedience to rest on his love for father and mother, and his unwillingness to displease them, nor on his conviction of the rightfulness and reasonableness of their commands, but on simple submission to authority that absolute and almost unlimited authority which all parents are commissioned by God and nature to exercise over their offspring during the period while the offspring remain dependent upon their care.

Jacob Abbott - Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young: Or, the Principles on Which a Firm Parental Authority May Be: Established and Maintained, Without Violence or Anger, and the Right: Development of the Moral and Mental Capacities Be Promoted by Methods: in Harmony with the Structure and the Characteristics of the Juvenile: Mind

A strong conviction of the great wrong of slavery, and of its utter incompatibility with the Christian profession, seized upon his mind. While at Great Barrington, he had himself owned a slave, whom he had sold on leaving the place, without compunction or suspicion in regard to the rightfulness of the transaction.

John Greenleaf Whittier - Old Portraits, Modern Sketches, Personal Sketches and Tributes: Complete, Volume VI., the Works of Whittier

Nor was Mrs. Trevennack, for her part, entirely free from sundry qualms of conscience as to her husband's condition and the rightfulness of concealing it altogether from Cleer's accepted lover.

Grant Allen - Michael's Crag

That the moral sense of the race is against the admissibility of the rightfulness of lying, is shown by the estimate of this sin as a sin in the ethnic conceptions of it, even among peoples who indulge freely in its practice, as well as in the teachings of the sacred books of the ages.

H. Clay (Henry Clay) Trumbull - A Lie Never Justifiable

A strong conviction of the great wrong of slavery, and of its utter incompatibility with the Christian profession, seized upon his mind. While at Great Barrington, he had himself owned a slave, whom he had sold on leaving the place, without compunction or suspicion in regard to the rightfulness of the transaction.

John Greenleaf Whittier - Old Portraits, Part 1, from Volume VI.,: The Works of Whittier: Old Portraits and Modern Sketches

A few years since, some slaveholders became a little uneasy in their minds about the rightfulness of permitting slaves to take to themselves husbands and wives, while they still had others living, and applied to their religious teachers for advice; and the following will show how this grave and important subject was treated:

William Wells Brown - Clotel; or, the President's Daughter

One may say with all simplicity, that the question has, of course, as much rightfulness as has any other question any man could raise. The somewhat extended discussion has, however, done nothing to make evident how it could arise, save in minds unfamiliar with the materials and unskilled in historical research.

Edward Caldwell Moore - An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

They did not object to their inherent and essential justice and rightfulness, but with instinctive caution they feared that an attempt to wipe away the prejudices of two centuries in a single day might lead to a dangerous re-action, and to a consequent change in the political control of the country.

James Gillespie Blaine - Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 : From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

When a man is inclined to marry a particular woman, and has made any committal of himself, this woman's opinions, however different from his own, are readily regarded as part of her pretty ways, especially if they are merely negative; as, for example, that she does not insist on the Trinity or on the rightfulness or expediency of church rates, but simply regards her lover's troubling himself in disputation on these heads as stuff and nonsense.

George Eliot - Impressions of Theophrastus Such